Reverse engineering reusable software components from object-oriented APIs

Object-oriented Application Programing Interfaces (APIs) support software reuse by providing pre-implemented functionalities. Due to the huge number of included classes, reusing and understanding large APIs is a complex task. Otherwise, software components are accepted to be more reusable and understandable entities than object-oriented ones. Thus, in this paper, we propose an approach for reengineering object-oriented APIs into component-based ones. We mine components as a group of classes based on the frequency they are used together and their ability to form a quality-centric component. To validate our approach, we experimented on 100 Java applications that used four APIs.